1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for producing a reversible thermosensitive recording medium having an inlet (electronic information recording section), a production apparatus for the same, and a reversible thermosensitive recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
IC cards have been increasingly used in various aspects from users' daily lives to business activities. Actually, they are used as various cards (e.g., cash cards, credit cards, prepaid cards and ETC cards (electronic toll collection system)); in transportation facilities (e.g., railways and buses); as affiliate cards for digital broadcasting, 3rd generation mobile phones, etc.; in library service counters; and as student ID cards, employee ID cards, basic resident register cards, etc. Meanwhile, the amount of IC cards disposed of has been being increasing in accordance with diversification of the current economic and social activities.
In view of this, there is a keen need to create a recycling society, where material consumption is reduced and less environmental load is given, by reconsidering the current economic societies and lifestyles involving mass production, mass consumption and mass disposal to promote effective utilization and recycling of materials.
As one promising measure, electronic information recording module-embedded reversible thermosensitive recording media, wherein the electronic information recording module includes an electronic information recording element (hereinafter may be referred to as an “IC chip”) and an antenna circuit, can be used for reducing the amount of products disposed of. This is because they can rewrite information stored in the IC chip and show information as a visible image on their surface.
Such electronic information recording module-embedded reversible thermosensitive recording media have been used in the manufacturing industry as instruction sheets such as operation sheets, parts management sheets and process management sheets. Actually, there is repeatedly performed a cycle including winding an instruction sheet around a rod-like part or inserting it into a card case, and rewriting the content of the instruction sheet.
When an image is formed on or erased from it, a heating device (e.g., thermal head, erase bar, erase roller and erase plate) of the printer is pressed against the instruction sheet. Thus, rewriting of a print image on the instruction sheet (reversible thermosensitive recording medium) must be performed so as not to break the electronic information recording module and not to avoid outflow of an adhesive from an adhesion portion between the electronic information recording module and the reversible thermosensitive recording medium. Furthermore, desirably, the instruction sheet is flexible and shows a high-quality image.
Moreover, a tag may be bent when the tag placed on a table surface is picked up, and a tag is taken out from a tag holder in an outer frame on a box. Thus, when the tag is picked up by hands upon operation, it is demanded that the tag be easily handled by flexibly changing its shape without locally bending its shape.
Moreover, it is demanded to provide a reversible thermosensitive recording medium which is recovered from a shape varied upon holding to a flat shape at high speed which is capable of reducing conveying failure and jam caused by curling or surface waviness in the printer when the reversible thermosensitive recording medium is rapidly picked up and fed to a printer for image formation and erasure immediately after being held. Moreover, it is also demanded that a printer be filled with thermosensitive recording media (tags) as many as possible so as to decrease the number of access to the printer and shorten operation time, to thereby improve efficiency of operation in the field.
Furthermore, in addition to imparting various properties such as flexibility to a reversible thermosensitive recording medium, in order to increase the number of thermosensitive recording media fed to a printer, it is important to make the reversible thermosensitive recording medium thin, and thus, it is demanded to reduce the total thickness of a tag.
High print quality of images is maintained by improving close-contact properties of the surface of a thermosensitive recording layer with a printer head.
However, the thickness of an IC chip of an electronic information recording element cause a bottleneck to reduce the total thickness of a reversible thermosensitive recording medium. By solving the problem with the thickness of an IC chip, the total thickness of a reversible thermosensitive recording medium can be made thin while the surface of a reversible thermosensitive recording medium being kept smooth.
Conventionally, to solve the problem with the thickness of such an IC chip, there have been provided a method of producing a reversible thermosensitive recording medium and a production apparatus thereof using a technique of forming a through hole for housing an IC chip in a base material serving as a base and inserting the IC chip into the through hole (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (JP-A) No. 2009-129217).
This proposal aims to achieve high-precision registration for inserting an IC chip in a through hole formed in a base material. After formation of a through hole, the operation is stopped at a certain position, and positional operation is performed so that the hole corresponds to the position of the IC chip, followed by lamination of the base material with an inlet, thereby achieving high-precision registration.
However, in this proposal, the laminating the base material with the inlet is designed as an intermittent operation in which a stop of the lamination and conveyance are intermittently repeated, and these members are laminated in an area contact during stop of the operation, and thus, unfavorably, air bubbles are easily included between the base material and the inlet in the lamination process.
In addition, when an adhesive is used in lamination of the base material and the inlet, the adhesive coating step is included before the lamination. When this operational process is performed intermittently, it is difficult to uniformly apply the adhesive to the base material in the conveyance direction of the base material, the thickness of the resulting product is liable to vary, in addition to decreasing in the efficiency of positioning adjustment.
Further, in the above proposal, the hole into which an IC chip is inserted is a through hole, and the position of the IC chip is detected below the through hole to perform positional correction. When the base material is a base onto which a reversible thermosensitive recording layer is applied, a through hole cannot be formed in the surface of the reversible thermosensitive recording layer for allowing the resulting reversible thermosensitive recording medium to exhibit necessary functions. Therefore, the proposal has a drawback in that the position of the IC chip cannot be detected and lamination ensuring high-precision positioning cannot be achieved.
The above-mentioned problems cause concave-convex portions in a surface of a reversible thermosensitive recording medium, and this leads to recording failure and erasure failure in printing with a printer.